Monday, June 28, 2004

. . . and Raznor's Europe trip is coming to an end

So this is it. My plane leaves Amsterdam Schiphol at 9:55 tomorrow morning, which is, for those keeping track, 12:55am back home. It's been five-weeks, I'm relaxed and doing well, and ready to get back home. Soon this blog will go back to more political commentary and the like, and I may finally do some renovations, like pay for a domain name and add a blogroll and update the template and the like.

Monday, June 21, 2004

Damn you criminals. DAMN YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!!

So on Saturday, me and my travel companions (my brother and his fiancee) came into Brussels Central Station and tried to find our way to our hostel. However, it was raining, and all the streets around the station were diagonal, so when we were trying to find our way around, suddenly these two guys come by and steal our laptop case, and the bag that contained our passports, our train tickets and our plane tickets among other things. So yeah, that really, really sucked.

(Side note: sorry Mica, all our previous photos had been saved on that laptop, so I no longer have any of the Budapest photos. We still have our camera, though, and a few pictures and videos on that, which I will still post when I get back stateside)

Here's the thing with Belgian Police though, they do not care. We made our way to the police station and they were playing with a puppy. It's not that it wasn't a cute puppy, it was very cute, but it just served as a way of saying "Oh, we do not care about you at all, and ain't doing a thing to help you." They wouldn't even file the report because we didn't have our passports, and would give us no help whatsoever.

Fortunately we had a contact at the US Embassy, so we went back to the police station the next day and actually got a helpful officer. He helped us file a report (you need to file a report before the Embassy can give you new passports) and got things pretty much under control. At the end of the conversation, my brother asked him if there's anything else we can do, and he responded, "don't vote for Bush." Which led to laughter and a quick little fun kivetching about Bush, and we left for lunch.

And this morning, to make things even nicer, the Embassy contacted us with the happy news that our passports had been found, so we got the passports, and then made it to the airport to get new plane tickets, and now, although we are short one backpack, some money, and a laptop, we're doing okay. (The laptop was a crappy one anyway, it's only function anymore was for storing photos and playing Baseball Mogul) Next we head over to Paris, then back up to the Netherlands for the final few days of this trip before heading home a week from Tuesday.

Thursday, June 17, 2004

Yeah it's been a while

Haven't posted for quite some time, but I'm still in Europe. Since my last post (was that in Vienna) I've been to Nuremburg and Berlin and now I'm back in Amsterdam. Still 12 days left on this trip, with Brussels, Paris and Northern Spain yet to see. Hope to make my way to Waterloo and Liege whilst in Belgium, but we shall see.

Friday, June 11, 2004

Raznor's Europe Update

I spent the day in Vienna. It was fun. Did a tour of the catacombs at the St Stephan's Dom Cathedral, which were quite interesting.

I'm going to get around to my thoughts on Reagan, but in the meantime, I think Ted Rall's column is spot on, and reminds me that I already have my own memorial to Ronald Reagan in the form of my massive education debt.

Saturday, June 05, 2004

Raznor's return to Budapest!

My longstanding readers may or may not know that I was in Budapest for a semester about a year and a half ago, so now that I'm back here for about a week, it's so filled with memories. I'm back at Kicsi Vilag teaház, where I spent so much time. Nobu's changed its name to Buddha Cafe, but they still serve thai food on baguettes (sooooo delicious), and the concept of customer service is still as foreign as, I dunno, something very, very foreign. I mean, really, I spent the first few minutes here trying to get just public transportation tickets and it bitterly exhausted me. But oh well, I'll keep going, probably check out Eger for a day.